Government is really big on fairness these days. Just can’t get enough of it. Both the federal and Ontario governments love the word. Even American President Donald Trump likes to go on about fairness, although his concerns are restricted primarily to himself and his fellow millionaires.

Premier Kathleen Wynne is the queen of fairness. Pretty much every pre-election promise she makes is cast as delivering fairness. So far, she has promised fairness for young people, tenants, low-wage workers and people who use electricity.

Dandy, but when will they get to the big stuff? If Wynne really believes that life is meant to be fair and that government can achieve that goal, she’s got a lot of work ahead.

Let’s start with health care. For the size of our population, Ontario has fewer doctors and nurses than the national average. The number of acute-care hospital beds per 1,000 people is the lowest in the country. The number of hours of help we offer our seniors in long-term care homes is the lowest in Canada, according to the Canadian Union of Public Employees.

When it comes to the supply of health care, the treatment Ontarians get isn’t even close to fairness. Is the national average too much to ask?

Wynne is worried about the income of minimum-wage workers, so much so that she is ordering businesses to increase it by 32 per cent in just 18 months. But what about the much more widespread wage unfairness in Ontario, the gap that exists between public and private-sector workers? Government workers in Ontario earn 13.4 per-cent-more than private sector workers doing the same kind of work, according to a recent Fraser Institute study. The same study showed that the public sector has better pensions, earlier retirement and less likelihood of job loss.

The public sector premium, covered largely by the taxes of private sector workers, is a workplace unfairness that dwarfs the minimum wage issue. Is it fair for people doing the same work to be paid so much more because they are employed by government?

Then there are the business handouts. Ontario gives away about $5 billion a year to businesses. About 200 companies, only 0.1 per cent of the province’s businesses, get 30 per cent of the gifts from government, according to the expert provincial panel studying the issue.

So big companies, many of them hugely profitable, get large cheques from government, paid for in part by the taxes of smaller corporations and their employees. Does that sound fair to you?

Wynne just can’t do enough to provide more fairness to young people, what with the free tuition and the free prescription drugs. Unfortunately, nothing is really free. Ontario’s debt is now nearly $312 billion, up 125 per cent since the Liberals took office. If you’re 25, you will be paying the rest of your life for services received by your parents and grandparents in past decades. That doesn’t seem fair.

And how about that Fair Hydro Plan? That means a lower power bill for a young person’s first apartment, but the discount is paid for with billions in borrowed money. Over their lifetimes, young Ontarians will pay far more because of it. If the Liberals wanted power rates to be fair, they should have thought of that before they made them unfair.

In Ontario, the Liberal fairness plan means making businesses pay more, making landlords take less, giving free tuition to some students, but not all, and pretending that power bills are lower. It’s a politically useful distraction from the types of unfairness that really matter, and that’s its whole purpose. In Ontario, the fairness agenda is nothing more than a new twist on the old political trick of targeting some groups of voters at the expense of others.

Randall Denley is an Ottawa commentator, novelist and former Ontario PC candidate. Contact him at randalldenley1@gmail.com

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